A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may reduce the amount of work and communication required by each participant, thus possibly avoiding scalability bottlenecks that may be inherent in previous distributed ledger implementations and possibly enabling the use of additional resources to translate to increased throughput. A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may be made up of multiple shards, each of which may also be a distributed ledger and which may operate in parallel. Participation within a sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may be allowed only with permission of an authority. A sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger may include a plurality of nodes, each including a dispatcher configured to receive transaction requests from clients and to forward received requests to verifiers configured to append transactions to individual ones of the shards.
Legal claims defining the scope of protection, as filed with the USPTO.
2. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard is unforgeable.
3. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises a cryptographic hash of a previous transaction included in the second shard.
5. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the shard transaction is sent to a leader verifier of the first shard; and wherein the computer-implemented method further comprises proposing, by the leader verifier, the shard transaction to a set of verifier processes active on the first shard according to a consensus protocol.
6. The computer implemented method of claim 5, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises information regarding other verifier processes of the second shard.
7. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises a count of transactions included in the second shard.
9. The sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger system of claim 8, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard is unforgeable.
10. The sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger system of claim 8, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises a cryptographic hash of a previous transaction included in the second shard.
13. The sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger system of claim 12, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises information regarding other verifier processes of the second shard.
14. The sharded, permissioned, distributed ledger system of claim 8, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises a count of transactions included in the second shard.
16. The one or more non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 15, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard is unforgeable.
17. The one or more non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 15, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises a cryptographic hash of a previous transaction included in the second shard.
19. The one or more non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 15, wherein the shard transaction is sent to a leader verifier of the first shard; and wherein the computer-readable storage media storing program instructions, when executed on or across one or more computers, cause the one or more computers to further perform proposing, by the leader verifier, the shard transaction to a set of verifier processes active on the first shard according to a consensus protocol.
20. The one or more non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 19, wherein the summary of the present state of the second shard comprises information regarding other verifier processes of the second shard.
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November 23, 2022
May 21, 2024
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